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Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, S173

Introduction

The collection of Harmonies poétiques et religieuses divides broadly into two types of work: a simple style deriving from a choral original, and large-scale romantic poems of abundant inspiration. Critics have been rather unkind about the success of the mixture as a whole, but the very incongruity is an essential aspect of Liszt’s character, and the lesser pieces are certainly helped by being heard in context. As well as the Ave Maria, the Pater noster and the Hymne de l’Enfant were original choral pieces by Liszt. The Miserere was noted down by Liszt as a work of Palestrina which he heard performed in the Sistine Chapel. However, Palestrina has absolutely nothing to do with the odd melody of the motet which Liszt has collected and elaborated with tremolo and arpeggio variations. Another choral sketch is the basis for the second part of Pensée des morts. This piece is the reworking of the first part of the earlier Harmonies poétiques along with material from a sketched setting of the psalm ‘De profundis’, whose musical make-up is very similar to that of a long almost-complete work for piano and orchestra of the same title from 1834–5.

Several of the pieces are prefaced by stanzas from Lamartine’s poems, whence some of the titles derive. The Invocation is at once a prayer and a triumphant cry of faith, and, like many of Liszt’s works of this kind, is cast in E major.

Bénédiction de Dieu is the largest and finest piece of the set, and the added-sixth harmonies in F sharp major look forward to the religiously inspired music of Messiaen. The central Andante is perfect in its simplicity and reserve, and another delicate theme—sostenuto—precedes the return of the main material. Both secondary themes return in the gentle coda. Funérailles is subtitled ‘October 1849’. Many silly suggestions have been put about as to its inspiration—none less accurate than the notion that the piece is in memory of Chopin and that the tremendous galloping left-hand octaves in the middle section derive from Chopin’s A flat Polonaise. Many of Liszt’s acquaintances died in the mass execution at the hands of the Austrian court of Hungarian prime minister Batthyany and sixteen of his officers on 6 October 1849, in the aftermath of the failure of the 1848–9 revolution in Hungary. Although the ninth piece in the set is known only by its tempo direction, the poem which inspired it is entitled ‘Une larme ou consolation’, and that sets the tone for this inexplicably neglected piece, very tightly constructed, whose greatness is perhaps occluded by its sheer delicacy. Cantique d’amour returns to the tonality and warmth of the Invocation, but on a more intimate footing—an effort, perhaps, to ally love of God to human affection.

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Although most of Liszt’s best-known music was either written or revised during his Weimar years, much of it had a very long gestation indeed, with some sketches and early versions dating back a decade or more. In 1834 Liszt had produced a strikingly avant-garde, if slightly disjointed piece entitled Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, a feverish, improvisatory musical response to Alphonse de Lamartine’s poetry collection of the same name. Some years later he began toying with the idea of producing a cycle of compositions inspired by the same source, a plan which finally came to fruition in 1853. This group (the title Harmonies poétiques et religeuses now applying to the collection of ten pieces) includes two of Liszt’s finest works, the epic Funérailles and the gloriously expansive Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude (God’s blessing in the wilderness). Liszt subscribed the score of the latter with the first lines of the poem, which happily fit the opening melody, and give the key to the mood of the piece: ‘D’où me vient, ô mon Dieu, cette paix qui m’inonde? / D’où me vient cette foi dont mon cœur surabonde?’ (‘O my Lord, whence comes this peace that overwhelms me? Whence comes this faith with which my heart overflows?’).

The melody is one of the most affecting that Liszt ever composed. And its accompaniment is no less imaginative—a remarkably original figuration that wreaths the tune in a perfumed halo of mildly pentatonic musical incense. But Lamartine was not the sole inspiration for this wonderfully sensuous music. An earlier version of the main melody had once been intended for a piece entitled Marie: Poème—a tribute to Liszt’s first long-term partner, Marie d’Agoult. This is perhaps unlikely to have been known to the dedicatee of the final version—Marie’s replacement, the Princess Wittgenstein.

The seventh of the ten pieces that make up Franz Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, Funérailles essays the monumental and the tragic. An extraordinary, lingering in memoriam of epic vision and elegiac song, torn by anguish and tears, its pages commemorate not the death of Chopin (a once-popular view based on the association of the rotating left-hand octaves of its fourth section with those of the trio in Chopin’s Polonaise in A Flat, Op 53) but rather the doomed Hungarian uprising of October 1849. In its unfolding we find ‘not simply the expression of a personal sorrow’, Alan Walker believes (1989), ‘but a symbol of that universal suffering felt by mankind when great ideals perish and the heroes who espoused them (of whatever nationality) are no more’.